Put Money and Action Where Our Mouths Are

In the past weeks’ furor about nooses and graffiti, which dramatize age-old concerns about our Eurocentric curriculum, paternalistic gentrification efforts, and feelings of marginalization from students and faculty, Columbia has had to defend and confront its legacy of diversity and inclusion more so now than ever before. You cannot claim to be a liberal institution, wedged into Harlem, drawing from thousands of students of all voices, backgrounds, and worldviews, and then have that neat branding logo mean substantially nothing. If no one will call Columbia on its bluff, if no one will demand that Columbia actually be the paragon of intellectual and cultural exchange that it has mythologized itself as being, than it is up to us—students, alumni, faculty—to fill that unoccupied post.

When students of color insist that they feel silenced, unsafe, excluded and unwelcome, it is a claim that cannot be taken lightly. The clamor for institutional introspection and change is not coming from political ideologues pontificating about oppression. It is coming from your peers—the guy in your math class, your teammates, the people who live in your hall—relating real-world ways in which living and learning at Columbia are being undermined by the University’s unsound, unjust structures and policies.

You cannot ask dissenting students to stop talking, to stop questioning, to stop demanding—as has been the sentiment of countless blogs and postings (“How can a student ... be ... accepted only to belittle and complain about the same people who allowed him to attend? If you don’t like the administration, then leave,” says one poster to Spectator columnist, Christien Tompkins, after he articulates his frustrations as a student activist. “Go to class and stop protesting non-issues,” says another in response to the Bwog’s story on the noose incident at Teacher’s College). To benefit from the history, the location, the reputation of Columbia, and not ask that the University assume responsibility for its name by doing even the basic job of protecting its students and faculty is callous and reckless—and reeks of cowardice. All that we are reputed to be—liberal, open-minded, up for the challenge, provocative, inclusive, diverse—has to actually mean something.

But even when some of us are on board about changing the campus culture and asking the administration to create structures that reflect the values it so openly boasts about having, which steps to take can be unclear. Student activists have done a great job of articulating concrete ways with which to transform Columbia into a place that can lend heft to all its lofty notions of intellectual vigor and cultural freedom, and as students, it is clear we have work to do. We have to educate ourselves, we have to wrangle with what such demands would and should mean, and we have to engage in conversations that are uncomfortable. Critics of activists on this campus cannot remain safe in their inaction and silence. To them I say: Bring your imagination and knowledge to the table, stir things up, be a part of the dialogue, go to the meetings, come up with alternative demands, but if you disengage and lament the absurdity of student action while this University continues to perpetuate experiences of marginalization and isolation, if you are a quiet cog in what has become an unwieldy and failing machine, you are complicit.

The onus for change cannot rest on students alone. Despite all of its platitudes about its limitations, the administration has a firm grip on money and resources that can achieve tremendously what students can only talk about. I say the first thing it needs to do is to bolster ethnic studies, which currently has no hiring power or departmental status. A robust ethnic studies department, with more resources, more faculty, and more voice, would do wonders to elevate and enhance dialogue, understanding, and scholarship when it comes to power and privilege. The programming, the classes, and the faculty an ethnic studies department could generate—just its symbolic import, what gets signified when the University is willing to support and stand behind it—could be a giant step in creating the kind of community we want at Columbia. Maybe it could propel a much-needed look at our Core Curriculum, maybe it could clarify our muddled reactions to the hate incidents on this campus, maybe it could be our model as to how a university can remain competitive without bleeding into and taking over neighborhoods. I realize there are a lot of maybes, but there is also a certainty in all of this: Something needs to get done. Our curriculum is inadequate and outdated in an increasingly globalized world. Our students are being pushed further and further into the fringe. And we are consistently failing to live up to our name.

Candace Mitchell is a Columbia College junior majoring in English.
Under the Radar runs alternate weeks.
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